It would be a foreshortening to claim that Christina Zurfluh deals with the problems of painting in her paintings and problems of sculpture in her three-dimensional work. Since the beginning of her career, the artist has been interested in making the borders and overlaps between the two areas explicit, and not to work in solely one media-specific discourse. The resulting deferral and exceedance yield from the variety of methods she applies. The slightly older paintings are initially overlaid with another one. This creates a type of blank, such as a piece of stone or wood, waiting to be sculpturally moulded. The difference being that this blank encompasses a highly complex essence, in a way it is the sum of its paintings.

As a consequence it is again a painting, not a sculpture that is created, when the artist uses sculptural means to liberate and form this essence. This strategy seems to be the absolute opposite of what Modern Abstraction wanted to achieve within painting, namely to establish the panel beyond any form of materiality. And yet it is exactly this detour, via materiality and sculpture that Zurfluh takes, which enables us to have a view on fundamental attributes of painting: since the first has been so explicitly completed, the latter becomes all the more lucid. It is not a simple reduction or the attempt to find any kind of purity or autonomy. The appeal of Zurfluh’s work lies within the clearly structured confrontation of diverse aspects between which we may, when observing, move back and forth. Conversely, a sculpture made from wadded pieces of tape and canvas, directs us towards painting through its material. We do not merely perceive the external figure but in addition the inner, hidden planes. In doing so, Zurfluh is not concerned with the decomposition of different areas as is the case in the barrier between room and object in an installation. Her interest is the constant examination and progress of painting and sculpture which so ever occurs from the other’s position.

The new pieces, in their principles, follow these strategies, but it may be said that they are an abstraction of these schemes. The paintings are not altogether fragmented and torn any longer, but divided into monochromatic surfaces and multi-coloured figures which are situated above or beneath the plane. Within the monochrome areas, subtle geometric shapes appear which we associate with the minimalist painting of the 60’s and 70’s. Zurfluh thus introduces a historical moment, which strengthens her personal position, yet simultaneously augments the art with a further, more complex layer. Today, we associate Minimalism with that irrevocable crisis of American modernity, whose fantasy it was to create sculptural abstraction beyond materiality and define sculpture as something autonomous and spatially independent. Minimalism contradicted this in every respect. When Carl Andre describes Stella’s stripes as paths of the paintbrush, the other view of materiality is articulated. In that same manner, we see the theatricality debate of that time, as the crisis of the autonomous artwork. In Zurfluh’s work, these points are however once more shifted. The circles, which in the originals are dominantly strong and rich in contrast, almost dissolve in the monochrome.

Concurrently they are merely an in-anchorable layer of the painting which in its complexity again reinforces its autonomous character. Simultaneously we find varied allusion to the history of painting, abstraction and gesture in the multi-coloured collage sections. What used to be synchronically expressed as tension between sculpture and painting, material and imagination in her earlier works, is now equally expanded through a historical dimension, which has however long since become part of our cognition. The historical citation and the artistic method merge in a confident manner. The new sculptures may not cite explicitly, yet their form and size appear entirely classical. They furthermore do not refer to any other media through their substance. 

Nonetheless, the tension that Christina Zurfluh creates does once more concern materiality. Like flowing paint, ductile traces are dragged from and around the sculptures. The seemingly prototypical shapes have not been created from human hands- Zurfluh has transported the well-known drip painting into another medium. The process is in a complementary relationship with the ripping and grinding of the paintings. In her painting, both hammer and chisel are used while her sculptures employ the liquidity of paint.


Martin Prinzhorn